QuarkXPress 10 XTensions update

Over the past few months, we’ve heard from a number of you wondering when our Xdata, Xcatalog, and Xtags XTensions would be ready for QuarkXPress 10. While we’ve responded individually, we’ve been remiss in not publicizing our development status. We’d like to correct this now by sharing with everyone both our current status and our plans.

When QuarkXPress 10 was released a number of months ago, we were already behind due to the massive effort of moving our plug-ins to InDesign CC. On top of that, QuarkXPress 10 itself turned out to be a fairly major release and included a number of internal changes that required a good amount of adaptation on our part. We began our XTensions porting efforts a few months ago and have been slow but steady progress. I’m happy to report, however, that we’ve finally completed most of the QuarkXPress-specific port and now have working QuarkXPress 10 XTensions on Windows.

Unfortunately, the outlook isn’t quite so rosy on Macintosh, where Apple is forcing developers to move to the more modern APIs (for file handling, dialogs, etc.) that it is providing in its newer OSes (10.7+). We’re working on adapting our code, but the process will take additional time. We’re hoping that we’ll be able to release Xtags in the next few weeks, then Xdata and finally Xcatalog.

In the meantime, we’ve decided not to hold up the release of our QuarkXPress 10 XTensions for Windows so that those of you using Windows can get going on QuarkXPress 10 now. Their individual announcements and links will follow shortly.